Jean André Wahl (; 25 May 1888 – 19 June 1974)["Jean Wahl Dies; Existentialist, 88." New York Times Saturday, 22 June 1974, p. 32.] was a French philosopher.
Early career
Wahl was educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, interrupted by World War II. He was in the United States from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a
Jew at the Drancy internment camp (north-east of
Paris) and then escaped.
He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s (his book on Hegel was published in 1929), ahead of Alexandre Kojève's more celebrated lectures.[Bruce Baugh, French Hegel. From Surrealism to Postmodernism, New York/London, Routledge 2003, p. 1-2.] He was also a champion in French thought of the Denmark proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books Le malheur de la conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel (1929) and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the second issue of Acéphale, Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled "Nietzsche and the Death of God", concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of this work. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.
In exile
While in the U.S., Wahl with
Gustave Cohen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation founded a 'university in exile', the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York City. Later, at Mount Holyoke where he had a position, he set up the
Décades de Mount Holyoke, also known as
Pontigny-en-Amérique, modelled on meetings run from 1910–1939 by French philosopher Paul Desjardins (22 November 1859 – 13 March 1940) at the site of the
Cistercian abbey of
Pontigny Abbey in Burgundy. These successfully gathered together French
in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including
Marianne Moore,
Wallace Stevens and
Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French. He was also an avid reader of the
Four Quartets and toyed with the idea of publishing a poetical refutation of the poem. (See, e.g., his "
On Reading the Four Quartets.")
After World War II
In post-war France Wahl was an important figure, as a teacher and editor of learned journals. In 1946, he founded the Collège philosophique, influential center for non-conformist intellectuals, alternative to the Sorbonne.
[Emmanuel Levinas, Éthique et infini, Paris, Fayard, 1982, p. 47.] Starting in 1950, he headed the
Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.
Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the Parmenides of Plato as " Il y a de l'Un", and Jacques Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis, as a sort of antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse. This is the existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse according to Lacan, and the negative one is " Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" – there is no sexual relationship.
Personal life
He received the Grand Prix littéraire de la Ville de Paris in June 1971. He was married to Marcelle Sicard (1915–2002).
Wahl in literature
In 2021, Angelico Press published W. C. Hackett's novel
Outside the Gates, based on the true story of Wahl's release from the Drancy Internment Camp.
The narrator in the novel is Wahl himself, who alternatively tells what he is experiencing and muses philosophically on his situation in life, his sufferings and the sufferings of others in the war, and on whether or not there is a God. Hackett, himself a professional philosopher, artfully weaves in to the narrative former students and colleagues of Wahl.
Works
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Du rôle de l'idée de l'instant dans la Philosophie de Descartes, Paris, Alcan, 1920; rééd. avec une préface de Frédéric Worms, Paris, Descartes & Co, 1994.
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Les Philosophies pluralistes d'Angleterre et d'Amérique, Paris, Alcan, 1920; rééd. préface de Thibaud Trochu, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005.
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Le Malheur de la conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel, Paris, Rieder, 1929.
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Étude sur le Parménide de Platon, Paris, Rieder, 1930.
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Vers le concret, études d'histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel), Paris, Vrin, 1932; rééd. avec un avant-propos de Mathias Girel, Paris, Vrin, 2004.
[Michel Weber, « Jean Wahl, Vers le concret. Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel. Avant-propos de Mathias Girel. Deuxième édition augmentée [Vrin, 1932], Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2004. Critical review », Process Studies 34/1, 2005, pp. 155–156.]
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Études kierkegaardiennes, Paris, Aubier, 1938.
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Les Problèmes platoniciens : La République, Euthydème, Cratyle (Paris: CDU, 3 fasc., 1938-1939).
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Existence humaine et transcendance, Neufchâtel, La Baconnière, 1944.
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Tableau de la philosophie française, Paris, Fontaine, 1946.
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Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger, livre de poche, 1946.
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Petite histoire de l'existentialisme, Paris, L'Arche, 1947.
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Poésie, pensée, perception, Paris, Calman-Levy, 1948.
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Jules Lequier 1814-1862, Geneva, Éditions des Trois Collines, 1948.
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La Pensée de l'existence, Paris, Flammarion, 1952.
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Traité de Métaphysique, Paris, Payot, 1953.
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La structure du monde réel d'après Nicolai Hartmann (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1953) (Cours de la Sorbonne enseigné en 1952).
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La théorie des catégories fondamentales dans Nicolai Hartmann (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1954) (Cours de la Sorbonne enseigné en 1953).
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Les Philosophies de l'existence, Paris, Armand Colin, 1954.
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Les aspects qualitatifs du réel. I. Introduction, la philosophie de l'existence; II. Début d'une étude sur Husserl; III. La philosophie de la nature de N. Hartmann, Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire 1955. (Cours de la Sorbonne enseigné en 1954).
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Vers la fin de l'ontologie - Étude sur l'«Introduction de la Métaphysique» de Heidegger, Paris, SEDES, 1956.
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L'Expérience métaphysique, Paris, Flammarion, 1964.
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Cours sur l'athéisme éclairé de Dom Deschamps, 1967.
English translations
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(mostly about William James)
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See also
Further reading
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Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricœur and Xavier Tilliette, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, Beauchesne, 1976, 96 p.,
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Bruce Baugh, French Hegel. From Surrealism to Postmodernism, New York/London, Routledge, 2003.
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Michel Weber, « Jean Wahl (1888–1974) », in Michel Weber and William Desmond, Jr. (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, Process Thought X1 & X2, 2008, I, pp. 15–38, 395-414, 573-599; II, pp. 640–642.
